Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL FLUID MECHANICS
Volume 1, Issue 1, Pages 107-164Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1023/A:1011504001479
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Office of the Vice Provost for Research (VPR)
- Center for Environmental Studies
- Environmental Geochemistry and Biogeochemistry (EGB) Initiative of the NSF
- Urban Initiative of the NSF
- NSF
- Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ)
- Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT)
- Army Research Office (Geosciences)
- Department of Energy (Environmental Meteorology)
- USEPA via the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy (SCERP)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Recently, many urban areas of the world have experienced rapid growth of population and industrial activity raising concerns of environmental deterioration. To meet challenges associated with such rapid urbanization, it has become necessary to implement wise strategies for environmental management and planning, addressing the exclusive demands of urban zones for maintaining environmental sustainability and functioning with minimum disruption. These strategies and related public policy must be based on state-of-the-science tools for environmental forecasting, in particular, on mathematical models that accurately incorporate physical, biological, chemical and geological processes at work on urban scales. Central to such models are the mechanics of environmental fluids (air and water) and their transport and transformation characteristics. Although much progress has been made on understanding environmental flow phenomena, a myriad of issues akin to urban flow, the transport phenomena, air and water quality and health issues (epidemiology) remain to be understood and quantified. We propose to initiate a new focus area - Urban Fluid Mechanics (UFM) - tailored to research on such issues. For optimal societal impact, UFM must delve into fundamental and applied fluid flow problems of immediate utility for the development of urban public policy and environmental regulations. Such efforts often entail the use of 'whole' systems approach to environmental studies, requiring careful synthesis between crosscutting areas. In this paper, a few topics in the realm of UFM are presented, the theme being the flow and air quality in urban areas. Topics such as the scales of flow, the atmospheric boundary layer, pollutants and their transport and modeling of flow and air quality are briefly reviewed, discussed and exemplified using case studies. Identification of important flow-related issues, rigorous multidisciplinary approaches to address them and articulation of results in the context of socio-political cause calebre will be the challenges faced by UFM.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available